Phys.org June 29, 2021
An international team of researchers (Australia, Japan) discovered that on the neuromorphic dynamics of nanowire networks (NWNs), a unique brain-inspired system with synapse-like memristive junctions embedded within a recurrent neural network-like structure. Through simulation and experiment they elucidated how collective memristive switching gives rise to long-range transport pathways, drastically altering the network’s global state via a discontinuous phase transition. The spatio-temporal properties of switching dynamics are found to be consistent with avalanches displaying power-law size and life-time distributions, with exponents obeying the crackling noise relationship, thus satisfying criteria for criticality, as observed in cortical neuronal cultures. NWNs adaptively respond to time varying stimuli, exhibiting diverse dynamics tunable from order to chaos. Dynamical states at the edge-of-chaos are found to optimise information processing for increasingly complex learning tasks. The findings demonstrate the potential for a neuromorphic advantage in information processing…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Ag-PVP nanowire networks with memristive junctions. Credit: Nature Communications volume 12, Article number: 4008 (2021)